


these changes ain't changing me

by QueenWithABeeThrone



Series: a tale of two matts [3]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Heartbeats, Marvel 616/MCU Crossover, Parkour, Scents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 04:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4005955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/pseuds/QueenWithABeeThrone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The thing about alternate universes is: some things don't change.</i>
</p>
<p>or: Matt talks with his best friend (or a version of him), then has a parkour competition and a heart-to-heart with himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these changes ain't changing me

**Author's Note:**

> three out of three! this is a bit longer than the others. I might add more to this series, I keep wondering how Brett would take this new assistant guy Nelson & Murdock hired on.

The thing about alternate universes is, some things _don't_ change. For instance: a boy runs out into the street to push an old man out of the way, and in turn is blinded by radioactive waste. That hasn't changed. Neither, as Matt discovers, do heartbeats--the other Foggy's standing heart rate is near identical to his own Foggy's, though their voices and scents are different.

Matt's associated the smell of cheese dust and microwaveable food and the sound of Broadway with Foggy for a while now. This Foggy still smells like cheese dust, and now of old paper, but there's something else underneath, something cloying that sets off a little alarm in Matt's head.

When they were in college, he and Foggy had to drive to the hospital in the middle of the night--Foggy's Aunt Winnie had been hospitalized, and the diagnosis hadn't been good. He remembers the overwhelming smells of the hospital, the stench of the chemicals being pumped through bodies, the smell of people rotting from the inside-out.

This Foggy smells, ever so faintly, of the hospital. There's a faint trace of the stench of chemicals still on him, and something else too that he can't quite identify, and sometimes it makes bile rise up in Matt's throat.

He wonders how the other him was able to handle it. He wonders a lot about the other him, because he can't imagine himself willingly giving up the secrecy for almost anything, not with lives on the line, lives of the only people he can even begin to call family now. He can't imagine himself doing some of the things his other self has done, from the ridiculous (barring the twin brother debacle, but that had been _one time_ in college) to the disturbing.

And there's a surprising amount of disturbing things he's heard from the other Matt.

\--

Foggy--the other Matt's Foggy, _his_ Foggy who doesn't have that hospital-and-illness smell is currently out with Karen, Kirsten and the other Matt conning their way into a building suspected to be full of asbestos--says, "All right, Matty, spit it out."

"Spit what out?" Matt asks, his fingers coming to an abrupt stop.

"Whatever's eating you," says Foggy. "You're overthinking it, aren't you? Some things really don't change at all."

"I'm not--" he starts, then sighs. He doesn't need enhanced senses to tell that Foggy doesn't believe him, and anyway, it had been kind of stupid--this is Foggy. A different version of his best friend, to be sure, but still. Foggy _knows_ him. "You smell like a hospital."

"Gee, thanks," Foggy dryly says. "That's kinda what happens when you're sick with _cancer_."

"I've been thinking about--constants, lately," Matt says. "Your Matt was blinded the same way I was, and we both became Daredevil later on. That's one constant. We room with you in college, then put up our own law practice after graduating. That's another. No matter what changes, there are things that stay the same. And at the same time, there are--variables. There are events that occur later in life--my father died when I was nine, his while he was in college. There are events that don't occur at all, or people that don't exist--I've met my Foggy's mother, and suffice it to say she's a lovely woman who once wanted her son to be a butcher."

"I never thought it'd be possible to be jealous of yourself till I got here," Foggy remarks.

"The thing is," says Matt, "I don't know which of the events you've told us about are constant or changeable. Not until they happen."

"You're scared that your Foggy might get sick," says Foggy, after a loaded silence. "With what I've got, or something worse. You're scared for Karen." He breathes out, and Matt deigns not to comment on the fact that he can smell the cheesecake on his breath. "Matt."

"Yes?"

"Nothing's set in stone," says Foggy. "Not until it happens. I can't say it won't, because then you'd know I'd be lying, but you guys have something we didn't when it all happened to us, and that's information." He sets a hand down on the desk, and when Matt reaches out to take it, it's warm. Thinner than he knows Foggy should be, but warm, and the heartbeat steady under his fingertips. "Nothing's set in stone, Matt."

Matt doesn't tell him that he knows Foggy's trying to convince _himself_.

\--

One great thing about having someone else to patrol with: parkour competitions. The other Matt's a more than willing opponent, so come nightfall, there are two Daredevils free running through Hell's Kitchen, one in black (with body armor underneath, courtesy of Kirsten when she found out his old outfit was " _as thin as tissue paper, Murdock, you are not going out in this without something underneath_ ") and the other in muted red.

He'd laid down one rule for the nightly contest, just to even his odds against his more experienced alternate: no grappling hook. One day, though, he's going to have to get his own.

That's the thought that runs through his head as he leaps over a gap, tucking into a roll when he hits the ground and coming up running. The other Matt took a different route tonight, and he can hear the slap of his shoes against cement and metal a block away. He's catching up.

He vaults over a crate when he hears a piercing scream. He changes course, makes his way down to the ground, and then throws an escrima stick at a window. When the glass shatters, the pleas get clearer ( _take it, take it all, just please, don't kill me, please_ ) and Matt finds himself jumping into chaos.

\--

It is incredibly easy to take out five opponents in about fifteen minutes.

Taking out five opponents--all armed and firing wildly and cursing loudly, if not trying to charge either one of them--and keeping their would-be victim safe from the bullets _and_ trying to dodge said bullets at the same time is--a little bit harder. Matt can attest to that, and he's sure his younger counterpart can too, now.

They've dropped the thugs off on the precinct's doorstep (which had been a bitch and a half, one of them had brought a knife and they'd had to drop by Claire's afterwards) when the other Matt says, "I talked to your Foggy."

"About constants and variables?" Matt asks. "He mentioned something like that happened while we were out. You were right, there was a disturbingly high amount of asbestos."

"I figured," the other Matt dryly says, then: "Foggy-- _my_ Foggy--is fairly optimistic about it."

"And you're not."

The silence says it all--or, really, he can hear the other Matt's heartbeat, loud and clear as a bell, in the silence that follows.

"No offense," says the younger Matt at last, "but I wouldn't want your life."

"None taken," Matt says, huffing out a brief laugh and hissing at the stabbing pain in his side. "I'm happy enough where it is now, but getting it there was another story entirely." He thinks about the ruins of his apartment--here, in this New York that has only found out about the existence of aliens and superheroes but a few years ago, the site of his former apartment is a Thai restaurant. He thinks about Milla, sane and happy here, about Karen and Foggy, about the Daily Bugle's expose and the Hand and Shadowland, none of which have happened to the younger Matt before him. _Yet_. "I wouldn't wish any of it on almost anyone."

"Almost?"

"I could think of a few people," Matt mutters. He can hear his alternate suck in a breath, then let it out, as though he'd been about to ask a question before dismissing it. "Go ahead. Ask. I'm trying this thing called honesty."

"You're not doing too badly at honesty," the younger Matt remarks, before: "What happened that you gave it up?"

He doesn't need to ask what it is. He remembers being that young, remembers being terrified that the people he cared for would be put at risk if the wrong person found out. He remembers feeling absolutely terrified when Foggy's cover had been blown, in that mess with the Owl, because that had been the very thing he'd been trying to avoid by faking his death. Honesty's dangerous, sometimes--secrets are safer.

But secrets, he's learned, can hurt too.

"There was a group," he begins, "calling themselves the Sons of the Serpent..."


End file.
